Join Gottlieb and I as we enter the murky waters of Foreign Policy, navigated by Cmdr Jeff Huber. In the aftermath of the UN speeches, and as G20 unfolds, we will interview Jeff and get his straight talk on what our Military is really doing and why.

See you there! As always, respectful questions and commentary are welcomed.

Join Gottlieb and me tonight at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for an interesting hour of Political Reporting and Commentary.

At any rate, being astonished to find a blog where I could post some of my thoughts about the tidy, near-instantaneous crumbling of the three (3) World Trade Center Towers… I wrote this in a comment the other day. Two people suggested I post as essay, I asked Budhy about it, got an OK. Any help with tags appreciated, but if you would be so kind as to leave the “Thinking” tag, I’d appreciate it. (Apologies, there’s some compare and contrast with DK here, I can’t justify the time to edit it out.)

After you read this, what I want to know is, “What do you think?” And, “Any hidden thoughts you’ve harbored, that you haven’t feltl safe to discuss, due to the prevailing thought-paradigm on this issue?” Again, “What do you think?”

It begins:

I doubt there’s a unified theory about 9/11 among the diverse posters, and it seems odd to me to think there would be.

I’m not the scientist, but I’m intelligent. Here are a few of my thoughts.

–I had previously watched videos of buildings being “pulled” or destroyed by carefully placed charges. A hired demolition, where weeks or months of work placed charges in advance, because the goal was to have the building collapse into its own footprint and *not damage buildings that surrounded it.

They create a simultaneous explosion, that reduces the entire building to small pieces at the exact same moment. People gather around and take videos of those buildings from various angles, to see how successfully the company hired was at placing charges, and if they achieve the near-impossible, making a building collapse in seconds into its own footprint.

This despite corruption allegations of the Pakistani government. “Separately on Thursday, an anti-bribery watchdog, Transparency International, warned that Pakistan has dismantled its laws against official corruption”.

“India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, has offered to report once a year to the United Nations on how successfully the country is curbing greenhouse gas emissions – another concession to the demands by developed nations ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit talks in December.”

“The report would spell out whether India was on track to meet its ‘domestic targets’ on curbing emissions growth without being enforceable under a new treaty… A similar communication is already published once every six years and quickly forgotten.”

The LA Times reports Five U.S. troops were killed in southern Afghanistan. Three soldiers died in a roadside bomb explosion. Two “were killed immediately and one died from wounds suffered… In other incidents, one American died of gunshot wounds suffered during an insurgent attack about 6 a.m. today, and another died of wounds received while on foot patrol later in the day.”

Although foreign casualties tend to make headlines, Afghans are dying in far larger numbers, undercutting NATO efforts to win hearts and minds.

“Sure the Taliban didn’t give women rights, and young girls couldn’t go to school,” said Gul Mohammad, 60, a shopkeeper in Kabul, the capital. “But they were good with security. There were no kidnappings, no thieves stealing from our shops. We need security.”

In addition to the CIA, it appears “that U.S. military interrogations also violated well-established laws and appear to have violated the Justice Department’s legal guidelines as well.”

Despite a military commission judge’s ruling “that Jawad was mistreated in U.S. custody, however, no one has ever been punished or otherwise held accountable. His lawyers say that despite repeated requests, the Defense Department never investigated whether its officers had violated the law.”

A while back I gave a breakdown of the “9/12” Project started by Glenn Beck. I never thought his fucking 3rd Grade-like project on “What I Love About America” would get the attention it did, but I was correct in the “types” that would be drawn to it, as well as the small number of people. The same way the camera “adds 10 lbs.” it can also “add 10 people” if given the right angle. Fox News made sure all the right moves were made to make it look like The Teabagging was equal to (quite literally given the “communist” accusations) the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, with Glenn Beck being their own Alexander Dubcek.

Ideologically, me and Glenn Beck differ greatly. However, Beck and I have something in common, ADHD.

While I attribute much of his deranged impulses to the condition, that excuse only gets you so much sympathy from me. I took the steps needed to control it throughout my life, but Beck seems to have taken the more negative aspects of it as some sort of personality trait to be cherished. You’re impulsive, extreme, and when your “put on the spot” Live on-air words and actions are broadcasted to millions of gullible fucking crazies, it becomes a threat to National Sanity.

Ok, so maybe I held onto a few traits of ADHD for multi-tasking and activist purposes 🙂

I am giving up the political board circuit to fully focus on this swine flu false flag operation. I would much rather be ready with other internet venues far more receptive and who will discuss what is actually going on rather than upchuck the daily Satanic media constructs. I hope I can garner some insight from other parts of the country before it all crashes and the communication stops altogether. From the response curve on politically oriented left and right places this is a waste of time. So I have decided to move on.

In the past 24 hours there have been four recommended essays on this blog devoted to the governance and/or publication policies of another, larger group blog dedicated to electing more and better Democrats. I wrote a fifth essay last night about the topic and then deleted it. I deleted it because it wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t sure why, and I couldn’t fix it, so I deleted it.

What I wanted to say then, and am saying now, is this:

My Brother and Sister Bloguer@s:

Like many of you, I have written for Naranja for many years. And I still post there. Like many of you, I have lived through all of the pie fights, the flame wars, and the bannings, always hoping that blog would continue to morph and change and grow ultimately into a progressive group blog.

Needless to say, it hasn’t. And I doubt it ever will. I think it has slowly but surely become part of the main stream and that the level of control there has become unacceptable at the same time that nastiness of commenters has run amok. I am not going to take the time to chronicle the many events that led to its present senescence. I will still post there occasionally because, as Robyn pointed out yesterday, that’s where the people are who need to be taught. And I have some things I would like to tell them. But I don’t see that blog being or becoming a progressive blog. Ever. No matter what. That has never been its collective intent.

Which brings me here, to docuDharma. This lovely blog, which I have considered a home for a full f*cking two years now, is so much freer, so much more wide ranging, so much more progressive, so much more interesting, that I don’t want to spend time looking ruefully at disappointing Naranja in my rear view mirror. I want to look out the front windshield at blogging the future, and I want to point out to you, brothers and sisters, what lies ahead for us in the future of progressive blogging.

I have no proprietary or financial interest in this blog. I know that those who own it and run it and make it continue to operate have allowed all kinds of ideas freely to be expressed here. Including topics that can get you banned elsewhere. So it seems to me that if we really want a progressive, leftwing (am I being redundant?) group blog, and I think we all do, what we need now is to build docuDharma and help it grow. Then we will have what we want.

How do we do that? We can build it in two simple ways: first, we put up lots of writing that is as excellent as it can be, and second, we let others know how excellent this blog is. In other words, building docuDharma, if you’re like me and have no responsibilities at all for the behind the scenes part of the blog or its governance or its technology or its finances, is easy. All you have to do is write well and let others know that there’s good, progressive reading here. If you build it here at docuDharma, they will come.

I think Naranja has jumped the shark. I’m disappointed but not surprised by that. But the best answer to its obsolescence, to its impending irrelevance, is right here. It’s to build a larger, more excellent docuDharma with your creativity and love.

Ok so I am sick, and I am a guy so I feel sorry for myself when I am sick, and when I feel sorry for myself, I don’t want (Mommy to make me) write. But, I also keep wanting to write shorter essays….that always turn into longer essays as I write them and find new devastatingly brilliant points to make and hidden wrinkles to point out. So maybe today I can write a short essay, although writing this long intro to why i am writing a short essay kinda fucks that whole thing up, doesn’t it?

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There is only one reason to send more TROOPS to AfPak…to kill more people.

Killing more people was cutting edge warfare in 1940. Decimate you enemies ability to fight by killing his army and you win. But here is a cluemail for the Pentagon…it is not 1940, and this enemy doesn’t have “an army.”

Killing enough Afghanis to get them to stop fighting and surrender is impossible. Unless you kill all the Afghanis who are pissed at you for….trying to kill all the Afghanis. < deadpan >That could take a while < /deadpan >

The only way to ‘win’ in Afghanistan is to get Afghanis to reject the Taliban. (If they reject the Taliban, they reject Al Qaeda)

They say it will take 400,000 troops to kill enough Afghanis to win. How much do 400,000 troops cost?

Of course we won’t send 400,000 troops, we will send 10% of that and instead of killing enough Afghanis to ‘win’ we will just kill enough to send more people into the arms of the Taliban.

How much does 40,000 troops to kill just enough Afghanis to drive them into the arms of the Taliban cost? Long term?

How much does it cost to put a school, a clinic, and a vocational training center to teach people to build and staff a school, a clinic and a vocational center in each medium size town?

Those among us who are familiar with the Bible will recall that Jesus Christ himself was an active member of the health care community as he travelled about the Holy Land.

It is reported that he practiced within multiple medical specialties, and his works as both an ophthalmologist and a neurologist are recounted within the verses of the Gospels.

But what if Jesus had been practicing medicine in the therapeutic environment we’re familiar with today?

In today’s conversation we’ll be tagging along with Jesus as he takes a few calls at his HMO’s Customer Care Center-and by the time we get done you should be able to bring a whole new take to those discussions you’ve been having about why reform matters.

I’ve spent the last 10 years doing almost nothing but studying politics and the super-rich. I’m very fortunate in that I don’t have to work. I make my money as a writer and am able to devote my time to whatever I want. What I wanted, and had wanted for years, was to figure out who pulls the fucking strings around here.

I wish I had remained ignorant. I began to use the mafia model to understand American and, indeed, global politics about 4 years ago. It best describes the situation in a way average people can relate to. Turns out, there’s a reason for this. Humans just like to organize into clans. It’s a sociological phenomenon. You can even see it in play in the leftosphere with little crowds and their various email lists.

This phenomenon goes all the way to the top. Globally you have hundreds of “crowds”, some of which intersect, acting like so many crime families. These “interests” assert power in various ways, sometime legally (it’s easy to remain legal when you write the laws – ask Bernie Madoff), and sometimes as illegally as any mobster operation.

It’s hard to visualize the organizational structure of such an array of interests. In many ways, it’s not very organized at all. This is what I always try to convey to people who want to see everything in a conspiratorial framework – it is far more complex, dynamic, and evolving.

Maybe there is some superpowerful Illuminatti out there. But I haven’t seen it. But there are big fish. And that crowd is the most dangerous. They are the bankers, arms manufacturers, oil barons. These are the untouchables. They control (not as one) corporations, private armies and intelligence agencies. They form the revolving door community of the big think tanks, government positions in Treasury, State, and the Senate, and they rarely ever get taken down.

The story of geopolitics is really the story of these big fish, working together on occasion, at war with each other on other occasions. It’s all very nasty business, but that’s the game if you want to be a billionaire.

These different interests rarely ever completely align but for a couple of exceptions: they almost all want to globalize the planet so they can conduct inter.., no, transnational commerce unimpeded, and they don’t give a shit about democracy or any other people empowerment ideas that can ruin their good thing.

Some really do want to form a world government of sorts, but it’s not the one the conspiracy theorists are always babbling about. Others prefer a wild west type of world and they try to sow instability so they can exploit it. These two groups, loosely defined, have been battling it out for decades. Guess who’s winning?

The stable world crowd once dominated and saw themselves as stewards of the meek. They didn’t mind socialism much and saw keeping the masses happy and complacent as the way to secure their dominance – soft power. Then in the 60s, the wild westers started to make a stand. Armed with shitloads of Texas oil money, they went after the Eastern establishment and helped shape the latter half of the 20th Century into something far more monstrous than the Rockefeller brother even conceived. And that’s saying something.

Then there was also just an element of unpredictability. Poachers and financial wizards moved on Wall Street and helped wild westify it without any ideological motive. They just seized the opportunity. And by the 80s it was pretty much anything goes.

As for how all this speaks for our democracy, people power, and the prospects of a young, wet behind the ears president, I don’t have a lot of hope. Just google “business roundtable”. Scroll down the list of thousands of hits, scanning quickly all the different chapters, front organizations, groups and subgroups in different states, cities and countries. This is just a fraction of the “Interests” network. Then think of ours.

The Business Roundtable is a lobby set up in the late 60s to take on the so-called liberal agenda. It’s main organization comprises the CEOs of the biggest corporations in the world. It’s sub-chapters, for lack of a better word, are in the thousands. They coordinate with the Chamber of Commerce and all their thousands of organization, the National Association of Manufacturers, and countless other business lobbies and thinktanks. It is a multi-billion dollar army with and army of PR firms to manipulate public perceptions.

Of course, they need to spend all that money because their agenda is wholly unpopular with the public.

There is really only one organization on the planet that can even remotely take on such an omnipresent organization as the corporate lobby – the US federal government with the support of the American people.

And that will inevitably fail too unless a critical mass obtains and we remove the central instrument of control these interests have over our government – money.

We can try all we want to “elect better Dems” or any otgher strategy we can think of, but none will work until we remove completely the influence of money over our political system. It’s that simple.

All this bullshit about netroots donors and small contributions are that – bullshit.

We can’t afford our government and we don’t have the organizational structure to do it even if we could. It’s a pipe dream. A constitutional amendment banning ever giving a politician or a candidate a single penny is the only way – followed by the construction of a public financing regime and serious media reform that forces media corporations to allow us to conduct our democracy for free on OUR airwaves.

And as long as those media corporations are the primary source of information among the American people, there will never be a critical mass. If religion is the opiate of the masses, television is a coma.

This is it. Our only chance. I give us about 3 in 100 odds of success.